When this idea popped in my head, I knew I had to follow it. It's awesome, trust me.

I wrote this one during a showing on Nick of 'Dora Saves the Enchanted Forest', so you'll find some details of that in here.

IMAGINATION

They watched their daughter run off on another of her adventures.

Sometimes, she was gone the whole day until long after dark and they had to take her back inside and put her to bed, where her dreams would finish her adventures in her imagination.

On all of the days, a wild monkey would walk by her side, more interested in the food and tools she had in her backpack than anything else.

When their daughter was awake, her parents called her Dora, as their daugher insisted on it. When she was asleep or away, they would try to call her by her real name, the one she had been given at birth.

Sometimes it was impossible, the name having grown on them.

Their daughter had an active imagination. She had been declared mentally incompetent by several psychiatrists (on one visit, she imagined that she was going alone to a library to give an octopus some books back before they closed). They knew there was no hope for her to ever have a normal life, and so they kept her with them and intended to for the rest of her life. She wouldn't be able to live on her own.

Every day, she went out with that trusty purple backpack and a blank piece of paper to draw a 'map' on. She claimed that the monkey, the piece of paper, and the backpack could all talk and sing.

Her parents would just nod and smile while she would face away from them and talk to her imaginary friends, friends who would only 'talk back' when she told them what to say.

Sometimes she would be joined by more than just the monkey: most of the time she would imagine that she had a blue cow, or a gigantic red chicken, or a purple squirrel, or a bright orange fox that would always wear a blue mask. Sometimes there were others: one time it was a purple-and-white owl and a unicorn with a sky blue mane. Sometimes there were hundreds of these characters, each of which would speak a sentence and be gone, or hum a bar and disappear.

Around and around and around the house she would walk, speaking to herself. Eventually they decided that it was for the best to, in addition to a fence, to put up 'AUTISTIC CHILD' signs on the road near their home so that a car hopefully would be less likely to hit her.

As she grew older, the area she ran around in expanded: running in the middle of the road lanes became a common appearance. The monkey would follow her, taking cookies out of the backpack when she wasn't looking.

On a memorable day, 'Dora' caught the monkey messing around with her old red boots (there were cookie crumbs in the bottom). From that day forth, she called it 'Boots' and always pretended it was wearing them.

One day, she claimed that she recieved a message from a magical forest that was in danger from an evil king. She set off in the morning with 'Boots' to go through a village of elves, a cornfield run by scarecrows, and a tunnel that faeries would fly through. Along the way, the talking creatures would tell her of the king's evil deeds.

'Dora' wandered off around noon. When night fell and she still was not back, her parents set off to look for her.

On the third week of searching, they found her, dead by the side of the road six miles from their home. When the police did an autopsy, they found that she had starved to death, and inferred that she had gotten lost while trying to find the way home. The wild monkey was nowhere to be found, but they opened the backpack and found that there was no food in it at all, and guessed that it had taken it and run off into the woods to eat it alone.

Her parents took the body and prepared a grave for it. When they selected what to write on the stone, they gave in, and chose to use their daughter's selected name.

DORA

Our Little Explorer

Below it, they painted a picture of a little girl frolicking in a bright, cheery wood.